Ito Jakuchu

Directions: Underline the words in the story as you
find them,
unscramble them and write them in the boxes below. Ito Jakuchu was born
in Kyoto in Japan. His father was a rich groceryman. The grocery shop
had been in his family for four generations, and the family lived at
the shop. He was 23 years old when his father died, and he inherited
the business. He didn't really want to be a businessman, so after a few
years,he let his younger brother run the shop, and he spent the rest of
his life painting.
Jakuchu enjoyed painting pictures of birds, and in his garden he kept
all kinds of birds that he could use as subjects in his paintings.
In order to learn how to paint, he copied Chinese paintings, perhaps
thousands of them. Then he got tired of just copying the paintings of
other artists and decided to paint what he saw. He would watch the
birds and other fowl in his garden and then paint those animals.
He liked to paint pictures of roosters and hens . These roosters had
tails that could grow to be 26 feet long!
Jakuchu lived to be 85 years old and never married.
He did not enjoy fame for his painting during his lifetime. People only
began to become interested in his works after he had been gone for a
hundred years or more.
In the year 2000, which was 200 years after his death, the Kyoto
National Museum featured a showing of his artworks.